Prescription and non-prescription daily medications may be distributed to patients contained in a variety of different packages including conventional pill vials and blister packs. In many prescription dosing regimens, multiple oral medications are administered on a continuing basis to a patient at different times over the course of each day. The need to remove the oral medication from multiple different vials at specifically prescribed times each day can be confusing to a patient, especially senior patients. Patient confusion may contribute to partial prescription non-compliance or even complete prescription non-compliance if the patient fails to follow treatment directions.
To address this non-compliance concern, it would be desirable to provide a certain number of medication packages for each day that contain all of the medications to be consumed at specified times in the day (e.g., morning, lunchtime, evening, bedtime). Additionally, when multiple oral medications are to be administered to a patient, any potential drug contra-indication (whether detrimental or not) and the desired dosage intervals for each medication must be considered when determining how to fill these packages of medications. If, for example, the medication packages are provided for four specified daily times, each medication to be administered during that day must be allocated to the separate packages so as to maintain the desired dosing intervals and so as to avoid detrimental medication contra-indications.
Moreover, some patients have particular administration time preferences or life style choices that prevent them from reliably taking medications at a particular time of day, such as patients who do not awaken before lunchtime. For these patients, the medication for each day must be allocated to a smaller number of packages to avoid prescription non-compliance. However, detrimental drug contra-indications must necessarily be avoided even when using fewer medication packages per day.
In an exemplary application in which a patient receives four separate packages of medications for each day, a monthly supply of the medications will require up to 120 packages to be filled and verified. Some conventional filling systems move each package to be filled along a complex and lengthy path past a high number of bulk containers so that each medication to be placed in the packaging will be dispensed as the packages move along the complex and lengthy path. Although such systems have utility when filling pill bottles with multiple doses of an individual medication, these systems are far less efficient when dispensing single unit doses of medication into a plurality of packagings for each patient. A pharmaceutical filling operation may be responsible for thousands of patients per month, which requires hundreds of thousands of packagings to be individually filled and verified. The conventional filling systems described above do not provide sufficient capacity to fill and verify the high number of packagings required on a monthly basis, and these filling systems are prone to making additional filling mistakes as the movement velocity of packagings through the system increases.
Consequently, improved methods and apparatus for filling packages with various medications are needed that can improve prescription compliance and provide sufficient filling capacity to serve thousands of patients per month.